Student Activists of the Post Amerikan Listen to the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Real Time
This video shows student activists from Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois putting together their next issue of the Post Amerikan underground newspaper while listening to the Tiananmen Square Massacre in real time as reported by an embedded BBC correspondent. The Post Amerikan was the longest, continuously published underground newspaper in US history and served as a voice for an active counterculture movement from the 1970s to the early 2000s---a counterculture movement championing peace, democracy, human rights, the LGBTQ community, equality, transparency, free speech, democracy, etc. On June 4th, 1989, the Chinese government brutally crushed the student-led '89 Democracy Movement' in what is commonly known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Students had called for Democracy, an end to corruption, a free press, constitutional due process, and freedom of speech. At the height of the protests, about 1 million people assembled in the Square. The response of the Chinese Government was to declare Martial Law and employ the People's Liberation Army of China to purge the protestors with overwhelming military force including tanks and over 300,000 troops. Documents declassified in 2017 by the UK government indicate that the death toll may have been as high as 10,000.
